Once again, Obama proves he's a worse President for civil liberties than Bush ever was.
I had to Godwin this thread, but that's like saying Hitler wasn't so bad because Stalin killed millions more people. Obama, for the most part, has lost my support, but that certainly doesn't mean I wish Bush Jr. were still president. If I could choose any politician to appoint to the presidency, it would probably be Ron Wyden. Unfortunately, it looks like I'll probably be stuck voting for Rand Paul next election, despite the fact that I vehemently disagree with his economic beliefs, because civil liberties in this country have eroded so much and I don't think Wyden will be in the running (fucking Democrats will probably nominate another jackass who toes the establishment line similar to Obama).
Okay, I should have been more patient. There's an icon next to "most discussed" that changes this. The changes before the three views are minimal and they all feature the same crappy comment layout.
Goodbye fellow/.ers, I won't partake once this thing gets implemented. What made/. so great to me is that it encouraged discussions rather than mere comments. The new system looks like a haven for trolls. Way to become C|Net.
I assume the reason behind this is the whole mobile craze. Why not just have a mobile sight and a regular site? That's pretty normal.
Anyone know where to activate these? I can't see myself still using the comment section under the standard view. It basically got rid of all the things that made/. great and turned it into what every other news site looks like.
When it comes to the iPad, I think timing was really key. Those early Microsoft/Intel tablets were really jumping the gun -- the technology just wasn't there yet, at least not at commodity prices. Also, I don't think that Microsoft "brought the nextbook market back into their fold" as much as it got taken over by iPads and Android tablets.
I agree that someone else would have come to dominate the tablet market if Apple hadn't released the iPad, but what was key about the iPad was the same thing that was so important with the iPod and iPhone -- Apple entered the market at just the right time. When the technology matured to the point where they could offer a quality product at a commodity price (that also provided them with a high margin).
Ditto that. Even though I'm on Ubuntu right now for certain pieces of software, if I had intended on doing nothing but browse the net I would have booted into OS X because it's such a seamless experience. Even if I stopped using OS X completely I'd still buy Apple hardware. I have an HP laptop that goes with me in higher risk mobile situations (where there's an increased risk of it being broken/stolen) and damn does it feel cumbersome to use, even when running the same OS and software. I have to type slower, too.
I understand the marketing claims about Apple. My g/f loves her iPhone and when she saw the 5c announcement she got all giddy b/c of the prospect of getting a pink and green iPhone. Then she saw the 5s and it's fingerprint thingy and she was completely sold on that. But I have to admit, I like her iPhone more than any Android I've tinkered around with. I have a dirt-cheap flip phone because I don't text or Facebook or any of that shit those damn kids who won't get off my lawn do (no matter how loud I yell), but if I ever do decide to buy a smartphone it'd probably be an iPhone. It's not like my carrier charges any higher for iPhone data vs. Android data, and data charges are where the real costs are. Sorry Windows Phones, you don't even get my consideration.
Anyway, back to the point, just because some people buy Apple products for the fashionable factor doesn't mean that all people do. The brilliance of Apple products since 2001 has been the ability to package everything a geek wants into something the tech illiterate can use and crave. Nothing epitomizes this more than OS X.
It was a pretty poor choice of words on my part. I should have said something like 'constructive activities.' As you point out, watching t.v. or playing video games are solitary activities yet they're far from being productive or educational. The point I was getting at was that a lot of kids don't seem to be able to do something constructive by themselves or able to entertain themselves. I see so many kids who have a shitload of toys and none of them capture their attention for a prolonged period of time.
Parents seem so eager to please their kids they neglect their responsibility to make them grow into intelligent, creative, and moral adults. Something like Legos, or just paper and crayons, or challenging puzzles ought to be what parents buy their children for entertainment. But instead people stick their kids in front of cartoons which are paid for by advertisements for shitty toys so they kids beg for the shitty toys until they get them and then they play with them for an hour and never give a damn about them again. So they go back to watching cartoons until they see a commercial for some new shitty toy that they absolutely must have.
I'm not saying that shitty useless toys are a new phenomena. My friends had plenty of shitty useless toys when I was growing up, but my parents refused to buy them for me and I have extremely limited TV time. I think I'm a better person for it while most of my childhood friends that I'm still aware of tend to fall into one of two categories: Those who spend all their time watching TV or playing video games or those who spend all their time at the bars and don't feel comfortable in a solitary situation.
If I hopped in a time machine and went back 40 years and told everyone there that in the future, we will have instant real-time access to all of the knowledge of humanity, and global communication capability with billions of other humans, they would probably be shocked. And when I told them that in spite of these achievements, we mostly use these capabilities to entertain instead of educate, and have so ingrained them into daily life that we have created children incapable of functioning without continuous access to these devices, they would likely be equally shocked. I very much doubt they'd believe that this is how the technology would influence our society, believing it to be some kind of dystopian science fiction written by a hippie who smoked too much pot and got paranoid of the government.
Be careful. Even without a SIM, if you leave the battery in any cell phone can dial 911. I know someone who was charged with child endangerment because their child dialed 911 when they weren't paying attention (it's programmed into most phones by default so it's easy to dial). While this is clearly a case of the police being dickheads, police officers and prosecutors do tend to be dickheads.
Whatever the case, getting a 4 year old kid a cell phone is a stupid idea. He'd be better off getting the kid some Legos. Teaching a child how to take on solitary activities and entertain themselves is important. Teaching kids that they need to depend on the emotional support of mommy and daddy 24/7 is the reason there are so many unproductive pussies in this world.
The deification of this man is getting ridiculous. While I agree he's made some important contributions, those contributions are becoming significantly dated. More recently he's done nothing but tarnish the reputation of those involved in free software projects, and if the community as a whole would have followed his lead it would be nothing but an insignificant niche. His complete inability to compromise has rendered him pretty useless to the open source community at this point. In the last ten years IBM has done more positive things for open source than Stallman -- who would have seen that coming 30 years ago?
When I explain open source to someone who doesn't know much about it I talk about IBM, Google, Apple, Canonical, Red Hat, LibreOffice, etc. Practical applications that demonstrate utility. No one cares about abstract ideologies preached by some crackpot hippie. It doesn't matter if Stallman can code well or not because he can't work well with others, he's too uncompromising, and the 'pure libre' systems he runs have no value to 99% of computer users.
Basically, I totally agree with you.
Oh, and before anyone brings this up, Emacs sucks. I don't care what my dad says. Old fucker.
Why is it so hugely popular on/. to jump on MS so hard?
Do you really need someone to explain this to you? It sounds like you're just being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.
Just in case you're truly confused by this, after all your years on/., I'll let you in on the secret: Most people around here work with technology professionally or are at least technology enthusiasts. A common belief among these people, which is backed up by some solid evidence, is that Microsoft has in the past and continues to engage in extremely unethical business practices which are detrimental to the tech industry as a whole. And they make shoddy products, to boot.
It's strange how you bring up Apple, laying out a false dichotomy, when Linux is the system du jour on Slashdot. But while you're harping on Apple, it should be noted that despite some questionable business practices of their own, they've never been caught attempting to destroy Linux. They've never been caught bribing government officials to get their formats rushed through the ISO. They've never attempted to monopolize a market. Apple makes things that Apple users want, and it doesn't affect those who don't like Apple. Meanwhile, more than a few Slashdotters have to work on Microsoft systems because they have a pointed-haired boss who believes, "everyone uses Microsoft, we're screwed if we're not running Microsoft" despite the fact that it would be in the company's best interest to do business with practically anyone but Microsoft.
A lot of people here think Apple's products are stupid and overpriced, but that's no cause for moral outrage. A quick internet search of "Microsoft controversy" will show you a plethora reason people on/. jump on MS so hard. They're not alone in this category -- there's Cisco and Oracle and others -- but Microsoft will be enemy #1 for a long time to come.
It will just run failsafe mode if the system can't support Unity, which is basically an old version of Gnome. Failsafe mode is preferable to Unity anyway, and from there the user can install a better desktop environment such as XFCE.
People who give a fuck can install another window/desktop manager, for example I give a fuck and use XFCE.
This is exactly how I feel. It's so strange to me how everyone around here bitches endlessly about Unity. I tried Unity and I didn't like it. Now I use XFCE and Unity isn't relevant to me in the least bit, despite the fact that I use Ubuntu daily. On another system I run Mint with Cinnamon. It runs all the same applications. If I were running XFCE on top of it rather than Cinnamon, I wouldn't even be able to tell the difference between the two.
Canonical pays people to work on Linux full time. I'm glad they do that and they have my support for doing so. Just because some of those people spend their time working on a crappy GUI doesn't mean I'll damn Canonical and renounce everything they do, as so many around here seem to be doing. I don't like the KDE desktop much, either, but I'm still glad they exist and I do use other software they produce. I think Stallman's an insufferable jackass but I still use plenty of GNU software.
Too many geeks seek ideological purity rather than functionality. If Ubuntu stops being functional for me, I'll transition to something that is. I couldn't care less about the doom and gloom pessimists who think Canonical will lock all Ubuntu platforms into Unity in the future. If they do that, it'll hurt Canonical, not me. It's just like all the doom and gloom pessimists who have been claiming that Apple is going to replace OS X with some desktop iOS. It would suck if Apple did that, and I probably would stop buying their stuff if they did, but I don't see it happening as they know people like me would abandon their platform. Just like Canonical knows that I would abandon their platform if XFCE didn't run on it.
Yeah, we don't put enough people behind bars here in America. ..
Incarceration has few benefits and many drawbacks. It should be reserved for people who have genuinely proven themselves to be dangerous for society. "Throw 'em in jail" is a knee-jerk reaction and it's done more harm than good in the past. Examples such as alcohol prohibition and the 'war on drugs' are obvious.
I would be that imposing prison time for offenses such as this would only make top-tier corporate culture even more corrupt. Once a person is already risking heavy jail time it makes them more willing to commit other offenses they normally may not. Such as the drug dealer who murders a known snitch. You set people up to reevaluate their risks/rewards, and they don't always view it the way the law would like them to. So while, 'throw 'em in jail' may sound nice and morally righteous, perhaps you should consider the unintended consequences of such legislation.
The wolves have been gone for a long time. The deer only became a problem after fucking Disney rotted the brains of a generation with 'Bambi'.
All Ohio needs is more top of the food chain hunters (people).
You obviously don't know Ohio very well. If there's one thing we have no shortage of, it's hunters.
I agree the 'Bambi' problem exists: far too many people personify wild animals and see them as anthropomorphous cartoons rather than the non-human, non-domesticated animals that they are. But to insist that people who have no interest in hunting ought to take up the sport to help keep the deer population in check is a poor solution compared to reintroducing wolves to the ecosystem (and then not shooting them). Also, doesn't that kind of reek of collectivism? (I kid)
The problem is that it's cheaper for farmers to just shoot wolves/coyotes than to protect their livestock by other means. My house is on the range of a bald eagle. I'm pretty sure it's responsible for my cat disappearing. Maybe it was a hawk or coyote. That doesn't entitle me to shoot it. It's a risk I took by allowing my cats to roam around outside, which I think is preferable to confining them and turning them into fat Garfield-looking things. Generally, I frown upon shooting predators (unless they're damaging invasive species, like anacondas in Florida) just as I frown upon killing spiders. When people kill wolves and mountain lions and the like, they're making a decision that adversely affects everyone in that predator's range. Owning the property doesn't change that - habitats aren't confined to property lines. Aside from the population explosion of deer, raccoons and opossums have also greatly increased in population as humans have. They're a pain in the ass for many reasons and God help us if raccoons ever evolved larger brains -- those little rodents could one day overtake humanity planet of the apes style. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating a little, but those annoying little fuckers are already really smart and they have thumbs.
Okay, that's a neat video, but how about you give a concrete example grounded in reality? I doubt you can, as most national parks would have more value to a private owner as a source of natural resources than as a pay-per-visit park. I know you libertarians also don't believe in property taxes, but as long as they're a reality no single individual could afford to own a place like Yellowstone even if they decided to take the lesser profits from admission fees rather than the very high profits of resource exploitation.
Wayne National Forest was created as part of the New Deal programs after miners and loggers had stripped almost all of southeastern Ohio of its natural resources. The land became so useless that most of the remaining inhabitants were subsistence farmers who just couldn't afford or were too ignorant to go elsewhere.
Another problem with private owners deciding how to best take care of their land is that they tend to be very short-sighted. Since Ohio was first settled farmers made a habit of shooting any wolves or coyotes they saw. These canids saw their population decline until the wolves became all but eradicated from the area. As far as the farmers were concerned, it was a victory for their livestock. But now the sparse population of coyotes are the only natural predators that hunt deer in Ohio, and as a result the deer population exploded and they've become a safety issue. I don't know a single person who hasn't at least come close to hitting a deer while driving country roads, and many people have been seriously injured or killed because of accidents caused by deer.
People organizing and deciding on ways to restrict freedom is the defining feature of civilization. Even classic libertarian and Randian ideals agree with that. The problem is that the libertarian/Randian viewpoint is that government restrictions on freedom ought to be so shallow that one could see all sorts of unintended consequences from allowing such rampant freedom. In theory it seems that one ought to be able to release rabbits on their property if they want to. In theory, they won't do so if the rabbits will become pests for their neighbors if their neighbors have the right to sue. But in practice the threat of a lawsuit 1) may not actually deter a person from doing terrible things 2) even be a reasonable threat if the rabbits don't become pests until the responsible party is long dead by the time the rabbits evolved from a mere cute invasive species to a continental pest 3) does nothing to solve the problem.
I'll agree that the restrictions of freedoms can be taken too far, that government can become overly controlling and micromanage too much. That's how I feel about the current U.S. government and many others. But a solution to that problem isn't to just allow people to do whatever the hell they want as long as they aren't engaged in fraud, theft, or murder. What a person does to the environment, whether it be their private property or not, affects everybody and laws need to be in place to prevent things like the eradication of wolves or the introduction of damaging invasive species.
With a dual-boot setup, this machine was also my first foray into Linux outside of a virtual machine.
He also just kind of lumps all Linux distros into one, it's not until the last page that you get to this:
Things that are coming in Ubuntu are meaningless to me because all the programs I use that have Linux versions require RHEL-based distros.
First, some specific examples would be nice. I've never had this problem and unlike most Linux users, I deal with the world of making "creative content" more than maintaining servers or hacking out code. Most Linux programs don't seem to care about what distro you're using. Ubuntu Studio is my OS of choice for the creative stuff. I used to use Mac OS X but it's just pointless now because there's a free alternative for everything I do on Linux.
I use Mint for the standard OS stuff. The Red Hat distros I always viewed as more server-oriented, which is why I found this statement to be so bizarre. Ubuntu Studio is tailored to the creative types so he should have reviewed that distro specifically. He mentions Ubuntu here and there throughout the article, but from his statements it's very apparent that he's using the standard distro with the Unity interface. The applications that Studio comes preinstalled with can be manually installed on Ubuntu, and the XFCE interface it uses can also be installed on Ubuntu, but what makes studio unique is its low-latency kernel.
That's not to say that Ubuntu Studio is the uber-creative OS this guy seeks. I'm an amateur musician and when I need to do image manipulation professionally it consists of little things (I'm not creating 3D models, animations, etc.). Maybe the professional creator who "works efficiently at an almost pathological level" needs some of the advantages of Mac OS X and the propriety software available on it, but it would have been nice if he had at least singled out the Linux distro that's attempting to compete and only used that one as a comparison.
As an amateur, Ubuntu Studio fits my needs perfectly and allows me to avoid the high costs of buying OS X software. The OS X software does look nicer but that's not worth anything to me as it doesn't alter the end result. Comparing Ubuntu Studio to OS X for me is like comparing my made in Mexico Fender Jaguar to a custom shop American Jaguar. Sure, I had to change the pickups to get an optimal sound, I had to adjust the neck a little to get the action just where I wanted it, but it was still a way better deal than forking over several times as much cash for the custom shop guitar. The custom shop guitar would have all sorts of little cosmetic details that would really impress people who see it, but when people listen to the final recording they can't tell the difference.
What does that mean? What is integrity but adhering to a set of moral principles or, as one might say, rules?
I think it's a severely flawed line of reasoning that concludes morality is some sort of innate feeling. There are some basic moral problems that seem obvious (such as murder is wrong) but much of the conflict in this world lacks such clarity. For example, a law that bans abortion may seem good to one who interprets life as something that begins at conception, but bad to one who does not. In a case where two people disagree on this issue, one of them is wrong. One of them will necessarily view the law as a bad law but that doesn't make it so.
To quote Vonnegut from a book about World War II: "Everybody else, no matter what side he was on, no matter what he did, is sure a good man could not have acted in any other way."
The sad truth is that those in government who are currently violating the rights of their citizens and partaking in various other forms of corruption believe that they're doing so for some sort of greater good. What is a 'good person?' Another relevant quote from Mother Night:
I would prefer to dedicate [this book] to one familiar person, male or female, widely known to have done evil while saying to himself, "A very good me, the real me, a me made in heaven, is hidden deep inside."
Almost everyone thinks they're a good person yet almost everyone has done bad things, be it consciously or unwittingly.
only politicians who actually promise that they can address issues.
So only all politicians? Has there ever been a politician who was elected on a platform of not addressing issues?
In retrospect, Obama's Nobel prize does look pretty bad and the Nobel committee ought to eat crow over that one, but I fail to see how this is a 'microcosm of the unbridgeable gap between progressive and left-wing aspirations and reality.' This is what I asked you to elaborate on - how exactly does an undeserved Nobel prize refute the political philosophy Obama claims to support (though he hardly does so in practice)?
There are more concrete examples of the unbridgeable gap between conservative economic policies and reality than liberal economic policy. Japan in the 90s is another example. That's not to say you can't find examples of liberal economic policies failing -- Greece is a prime example of how things can go wrong with such a model. I'm of the belief that there's more than one way to skin a cat, that both central planning and laissez-faire work as economic models but both have their own advantages and disadvantages. I think this assertion is backed up by the fact that there are functional economies based on both models, with most being a balance utilizing elements of both.
Obama's primary failures as president, especially in the eyes of his liberal base, have nothing to do with liberal economic policy. It's his support of the police state that was initiated with the original Patriot Act, which is a violation of his oath of office (to uphold the Constitution). This is not a liberal/conservative issue, as can be demonstrated by equal support from both sides of the aisle. The opponents of this problem -- Ron Wyden and Rand Paul -- represent opposite poles of the economic policy debate.
So, no, Obama's conduct as president does little or nothing to discredit liberalism as a sound political/economic philosophy. He would have to practice what he preaches for that to be true. He's done plenty to discredit himself personally, but I fail to see how that extends to the ideology he purports to support when he has hardly executed it in practice.
This is kind of an extreme example but in this regard he's kind of like Stalin. Stalin's lip-service to communism had little to do with his actual support of communist ideas and everything to do with him using the communist party as a vehicle to power. He made the real communists, such as Trotsky, enemies of the state or stooges afraid to contradict him. In this regard, Obama is a Stalin and guys like Ron Wyden are our Trotskys. On the conservative side, Bush was your Stalin and guys like Ron Paul were your Trotskys. The issues at hand are more nuanced than liberal = bad/conservative = good.
Congratulations on trolling a long ass political rant out of me.
Of course, when we were most critical of the USSR we also had a crazy congressman persecuting American citizens in kangaroo courts for their rumored political affiliation.
Diesels aren't that uncommon. VW and Mercedes both sell a decent amount of them in the States. It's popular for big trucks that need a lot of torque to haul stuff. Semi-trucks almost all run on diesel.
Until recently, there have been drawbacks to using diesel to fuel normal sedans. They were loud, dirty, and slow. VW and Mercedes have both invested a lot of R&D into eliminating these problems and have been working on them for decades. Like Mazda with the rotary engine, they made the necessary investments in the past that allow them to put incredible diesels on the road today. I find it hard to believe another company could catch up to VW when it comes to diesels without investing more than such a venture would be worth. Even though Ford, GM, and Dodge have all produced diesels throughout the years, their focus was maximizing torque for big loud trucks. Their diesel engines epitomize everything VW has sought to eliminate: loud, dirty, with a focus on maximizing power rather than maximizing efficiency.
Also, let's not fool ourselves into believing biofuels are an ideal replacement for gasoline. As far as the environment goes, it's like switching from cigarettes to light cigarettes. An added drawback is that biofuels are renewable, which means that if there would be less incentive to replace it with something better in the future, even if the technology was there. Our solution to gasoline shouldn't be 'gasoline-light.'
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Once again, Obama proves he's a worse President for civil liberties than Bush ever was.
I had to Godwin this thread, but that's like saying Hitler wasn't so bad because Stalin killed millions more people. Obama, for the most part, has lost my support, but that certainly doesn't mean I wish Bush Jr. were still president. If I could choose any politician to appoint to the presidency, it would probably be Ron Wyden. Unfortunately, it looks like I'll probably be stuck voting for Rand Paul next election, despite the fact that I vehemently disagree with his economic beliefs, because civil liberties in this country have eroded so much and I don't think Wyden will be in the running (fucking Democrats will probably nominate another jackass who toes the establishment line similar to Obama).
Okay, I should have been more patient. There's an icon next to "most discussed" that changes this. The changes before the three views are minimal and they all feature the same crappy comment layout.
Goodbye fellow /.ers, I won't partake once this thing gets implemented. What made /. so great to me is that it encouraged discussions rather than mere comments. The new system looks like a haven for trolls. Way to become C|Net.
I assume the reason behind this is the whole mobile craze. Why not just have a mobile sight and a regular site? That's pretty normal.
Anyone know where to activate these? I can't see myself still using the comment section under the standard view. It basically got rid of all the things that made /. great and turned it into what every other news site looks like.
When it comes to the iPad, I think timing was really key. Those early Microsoft/Intel tablets were really jumping the gun -- the technology just wasn't there yet, at least not at commodity prices. Also, I don't think that Microsoft "brought the nextbook market back into their fold" as much as it got taken over by iPads and Android tablets.
I agree that someone else would have come to dominate the tablet market if Apple hadn't released the iPad, but what was key about the iPad was the same thing that was so important with the iPod and iPhone -- Apple entered the market at just the right time. When the technology matured to the point where they could offer a quality product at a commodity price (that also provided them with a high margin).
Ditto that. Even though I'm on Ubuntu right now for certain pieces of software, if I had intended on doing nothing but browse the net I would have booted into OS X because it's such a seamless experience. Even if I stopped using OS X completely I'd still buy Apple hardware. I have an HP laptop that goes with me in higher risk mobile situations (where there's an increased risk of it being broken/stolen) and damn does it feel cumbersome to use, even when running the same OS and software. I have to type slower, too.
I understand the marketing claims about Apple. My g/f loves her iPhone and when she saw the 5c announcement she got all giddy b/c of the prospect of getting a pink and green iPhone. Then she saw the 5s and it's fingerprint thingy and she was completely sold on that. But I have to admit, I like her iPhone more than any Android I've tinkered around with. I have a dirt-cheap flip phone because I don't text or Facebook or any of that shit those damn kids who won't get off my lawn do (no matter how loud I yell), but if I ever do decide to buy a smartphone it'd probably be an iPhone. It's not like my carrier charges any higher for iPhone data vs. Android data, and data charges are where the real costs are. Sorry Windows Phones, you don't even get my consideration.
Anyway, back to the point, just because some people buy Apple products for the fashionable factor doesn't mean that all people do. The brilliance of Apple products since 2001 has been the ability to package everything a geek wants into something the tech illiterate can use and crave. Nothing epitomizes this more than OS X.
It was a pretty poor choice of words on my part. I should have said something like 'constructive activities.' As you point out, watching t.v. or playing video games are solitary activities yet they're far from being productive or educational. The point I was getting at was that a lot of kids don't seem to be able to do something constructive by themselves or able to entertain themselves. I see so many kids who have a shitload of toys and none of them capture their attention for a prolonged period of time.
Parents seem so eager to please their kids they neglect their responsibility to make them grow into intelligent, creative, and moral adults. Something like Legos, or just paper and crayons, or challenging puzzles ought to be what parents buy their children for entertainment. But instead people stick their kids in front of cartoons which are paid for by advertisements for shitty toys so they kids beg for the shitty toys until they get them and then they play with them for an hour and never give a damn about them again. So they go back to watching cartoons until they see a commercial for some new shitty toy that they absolutely must have.
I'm not saying that shitty useless toys are a new phenomena. My friends had plenty of shitty useless toys when I was growing up, but my parents refused to buy them for me and I have extremely limited TV time. I think I'm a better person for it while most of my childhood friends that I'm still aware of tend to fall into one of two categories: Those who spend all their time watching TV or playing video games or those who spend all their time at the bars and don't feel comfortable in a solitary situation.
If I hopped in a time machine and went back 40 years and told everyone there that in the future, we will have instant real-time access to all of the knowledge of humanity, and global communication capability with billions of other humans, they would probably be shocked. And when I told them that in spite of these achievements, we mostly use these capabilities to entertain instead of educate, and have so ingrained them into daily life that we have created children incapable of functioning without continuous access to these devices, they would likely be equally shocked. I very much doubt they'd believe that this is how the technology would influence our society, believing it to be some kind of dystopian science fiction written by a hippie who smoked too much pot and got paranoid of the government.
Ray Bradbury would have believed you.
Be careful. Even without a SIM, if you leave the battery in any cell phone can dial 911. I know someone who was charged with child endangerment because their child dialed 911 when they weren't paying attention (it's programmed into most phones by default so it's easy to dial). While this is clearly a case of the police being dickheads, police officers and prosecutors do tend to be dickheads.
Best "phone" for a 4 year old is an old one with the battery taken out. Our kids loved these.
They love these so much that they even sell fake plastic cell phones in toy stores. My friend's two year old blabbers on it all the time.
Whatever the case, getting a 4 year old kid a cell phone is a stupid idea. He'd be better off getting the kid some Legos. Teaching a child how to take on solitary activities and entertain themselves is important. Teaching kids that they need to depend on the emotional support of mommy and daddy 24/7 is the reason there are so many unproductive pussies in this world.
How often does a company choose the greater loss to make a point without approval from the top? I'm sure, at the least, she's aware of the situation.
The deification of this man is getting ridiculous. While I agree he's made some important contributions, those contributions are becoming significantly dated. More recently he's done nothing but tarnish the reputation of those involved in free software projects, and if the community as a whole would have followed his lead it would be nothing but an insignificant niche. His complete inability to compromise has rendered him pretty useless to the open source community at this point. In the last ten years IBM has done more positive things for open source than Stallman -- who would have seen that coming 30 years ago?
When I explain open source to someone who doesn't know much about it I talk about IBM, Google, Apple, Canonical, Red Hat, LibreOffice, etc. Practical applications that demonstrate utility. No one cares about abstract ideologies preached by some crackpot hippie. It doesn't matter if Stallman can code well or not because he can't work well with others, he's too uncompromising, and the 'pure libre' systems he runs have no value to 99% of computer users.
Basically, I totally agree with you.
Oh, and before anyone brings this up, Emacs sucks. I don't care what my dad says. Old fucker.
Why is it so hugely popular on /. to jump on MS so hard?
Do you really need someone to explain this to you? It sounds like you're just being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.
Just in case you're truly confused by this, after all your years on /., I'll let you in on the secret: Most people around here work with technology professionally or are at least technology enthusiasts. A common belief among these people, which is backed up by some solid evidence, is that Microsoft has in the past and continues to engage in extremely unethical business practices which are detrimental to the tech industry as a whole. And they make shoddy products, to boot.
It's strange how you bring up Apple, laying out a false dichotomy, when Linux is the system du jour on Slashdot. But while you're harping on Apple, it should be noted that despite some questionable business practices of their own, they've never been caught attempting to destroy Linux. They've never been caught bribing government officials to get their formats rushed through the ISO. They've never attempted to monopolize a market. Apple makes things that Apple users want, and it doesn't affect those who don't like Apple. Meanwhile, more than a few Slashdotters have to work on Microsoft systems because they have a pointed-haired boss who believes, "everyone uses Microsoft, we're screwed if we're not running Microsoft" despite the fact that it would be in the company's best interest to do business with practically anyone but Microsoft.
A lot of people here think Apple's products are stupid and overpriced, but that's no cause for moral outrage. A quick internet search of "Microsoft controversy" will show you a plethora reason people on /. jump on MS so hard. They're not alone in this category -- there's Cisco and Oracle and others -- but Microsoft will be enemy #1 for a long time to come.
It will just run failsafe mode if the system can't support Unity, which is basically an old version of Gnome. Failsafe mode is preferable to Unity anyway, and from there the user can install a better desktop environment such as XFCE.
People who give a fuck can install another window/desktop manager, for example I give a fuck and use XFCE.
This is exactly how I feel. It's so strange to me how everyone around here bitches endlessly about Unity. I tried Unity and I didn't like it. Now I use XFCE and Unity isn't relevant to me in the least bit, despite the fact that I use Ubuntu daily. On another system I run Mint with Cinnamon. It runs all the same applications. If I were running XFCE on top of it rather than Cinnamon, I wouldn't even be able to tell the difference between the two.
Canonical pays people to work on Linux full time. I'm glad they do that and they have my support for doing so. Just because some of those people spend their time working on a crappy GUI doesn't mean I'll damn Canonical and renounce everything they do, as so many around here seem to be doing. I don't like the KDE desktop much, either, but I'm still glad they exist and I do use other software they produce. I think Stallman's an insufferable jackass but I still use plenty of GNU software.
Too many geeks seek ideological purity rather than functionality. If Ubuntu stops being functional for me, I'll transition to something that is. I couldn't care less about the doom and gloom pessimists who think Canonical will lock all Ubuntu platforms into Unity in the future. If they do that, it'll hurt Canonical, not me. It's just like all the doom and gloom pessimists who have been claiming that Apple is going to replace OS X with some desktop iOS. It would suck if Apple did that, and I probably would stop buying their stuff if they did, but I don't see it happening as they know people like me would abandon their platform. Just like Canonical knows that I would abandon their platform if XFCE didn't run on it.
Yeah, we don't put enough people behind bars here in America. . .
Incarceration has few benefits and many drawbacks. It should be reserved for people who have genuinely proven themselves to be dangerous for society. "Throw 'em in jail" is a knee-jerk reaction and it's done more harm than good in the past. Examples such as alcohol prohibition and the 'war on drugs' are obvious.
I would be that imposing prison time for offenses such as this would only make top-tier corporate culture even more corrupt. Once a person is already risking heavy jail time it makes them more willing to commit other offenses they normally may not. Such as the drug dealer who murders a known snitch. You set people up to reevaluate their risks/rewards, and they don't always view it the way the law would like them to. So while, 'throw 'em in jail' may sound nice and morally righteous, perhaps you should consider the unintended consequences of such legislation.
The wolves have been gone for a long time. The deer only became a problem after fucking Disney rotted the brains of a generation with 'Bambi'.
All Ohio needs is more top of the food chain hunters (people).
You obviously don't know Ohio very well. If there's one thing we have no shortage of, it's hunters.
I agree the 'Bambi' problem exists: far too many people personify wild animals and see them as anthropomorphous cartoons rather than the non-human, non-domesticated animals that they are. But to insist that people who have no interest in hunting ought to take up the sport to help keep the deer population in check is a poor solution compared to reintroducing wolves to the ecosystem (and then not shooting them). Also, doesn't that kind of reek of collectivism? (I kid)
The problem is that it's cheaper for farmers to just shoot wolves/coyotes than to protect their livestock by other means. My house is on the range of a bald eagle. I'm pretty sure it's responsible for my cat disappearing. Maybe it was a hawk or coyote. That doesn't entitle me to shoot it. It's a risk I took by allowing my cats to roam around outside, which I think is preferable to confining them and turning them into fat Garfield-looking things. Generally, I frown upon shooting predators (unless they're damaging invasive species, like anacondas in Florida) just as I frown upon killing spiders. When people kill wolves and mountain lions and the like, they're making a decision that adversely affects everyone in that predator's range. Owning the property doesn't change that - habitats aren't confined to property lines. Aside from the population explosion of deer, raccoons and opossums have also greatly increased in population as humans have. They're a pain in the ass for many reasons and God help us if raccoons ever evolved larger brains -- those little rodents could one day overtake humanity planet of the apes style. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating a little, but those annoying little fuckers are already really smart and they have thumbs.
Okay, that's a neat video, but how about you give a concrete example grounded in reality? I doubt you can, as most national parks would have more value to a private owner as a source of natural resources than as a pay-per-visit park. I know you libertarians also don't believe in property taxes, but as long as they're a reality no single individual could afford to own a place like Yellowstone even if they decided to take the lesser profits from admission fees rather than the very high profits of resource exploitation.
Here's a counter-example to your video: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_National_Forest
Wayne National Forest was created as part of the New Deal programs after miners and loggers had stripped almost all of southeastern Ohio of its natural resources. The land became so useless that most of the remaining inhabitants were subsistence farmers who just couldn't afford or were too ignorant to go elsewhere.
Another problem with private owners deciding how to best take care of their land is that they tend to be very short-sighted. Since Ohio was first settled farmers made a habit of shooting any wolves or coyotes they saw. These canids saw their population decline until the wolves became all but eradicated from the area. As far as the farmers were concerned, it was a victory for their livestock. But now the sparse population of coyotes are the only natural predators that hunt deer in Ohio, and as a result the deer population exploded and they've become a safety issue. I don't know a single person who hasn't at least come close to hitting a deer while driving country roads, and many people have been seriously injured or killed because of accidents caused by deer.
That's not even the worst example. Read up on rabbits in Australia.
People organizing and deciding on ways to restrict freedom is the defining feature of civilization. Even classic libertarian and Randian ideals agree with that. The problem is that the libertarian/Randian viewpoint is that government restrictions on freedom ought to be so shallow that one could see all sorts of unintended consequences from allowing such rampant freedom. In theory it seems that one ought to be able to release rabbits on their property if they want to. In theory, they won't do so if the rabbits will become pests for their neighbors if their neighbors have the right to sue. But in practice the threat of a lawsuit 1) may not actually deter a person from doing terrible things 2) even be a reasonable threat if the rabbits don't become pests until the responsible party is long dead by the time the rabbits evolved from a mere cute invasive species to a continental pest 3) does nothing to solve the problem.
I'll agree that the restrictions of freedoms can be taken too far, that government can become overly controlling and micromanage too much. That's how I feel about the current U.S. government and many others. But a solution to that problem isn't to just allow people to do whatever the hell they want as long as they aren't engaged in fraud, theft, or murder. What a person does to the environment, whether it be their private property or not, affects everybody and laws need to be in place to prevent things like the eradication of wolves or the introduction of damaging invasive species.
With a dual-boot setup, this machine was also my first foray into Linux outside of a virtual machine.
He also just kind of lumps all Linux distros into one, it's not until the last page that you get to this:
Things that are coming in Ubuntu are meaningless to me because all the programs I use that have Linux versions require RHEL-based distros.
First, some specific examples would be nice. I've never had this problem and unlike most Linux users, I deal with the world of making "creative content" more than maintaining servers or hacking out code. Most Linux programs don't seem to care about what distro you're using. Ubuntu Studio is my OS of choice for the creative stuff. I used to use Mac OS X but it's just pointless now because there's a free alternative for everything I do on Linux.
I use Mint for the standard OS stuff. The Red Hat distros I always viewed as more server-oriented, which is why I found this statement to be so bizarre. Ubuntu Studio is tailored to the creative types so he should have reviewed that distro specifically. He mentions Ubuntu here and there throughout the article, but from his statements it's very apparent that he's using the standard distro with the Unity interface. The applications that Studio comes preinstalled with can be manually installed on Ubuntu, and the XFCE interface it uses can also be installed on Ubuntu, but what makes studio unique is its low-latency kernel.
That's not to say that Ubuntu Studio is the uber-creative OS this guy seeks. I'm an amateur musician and when I need to do image manipulation professionally it consists of little things (I'm not creating 3D models, animations, etc.). Maybe the professional creator who "works efficiently at an almost pathological level" needs some of the advantages of Mac OS X and the propriety software available on it, but it would have been nice if he had at least singled out the Linux distro that's attempting to compete and only used that one as a comparison.
As an amateur, Ubuntu Studio fits my needs perfectly and allows me to avoid the high costs of buying OS X software. The OS X software does look nicer but that's not worth anything to me as it doesn't alter the end result. Comparing Ubuntu Studio to OS X for me is like comparing my made in Mexico Fender Jaguar to a custom shop American Jaguar. Sure, I had to change the pickups to get an optimal sound, I had to adjust the neck a little to get the action just where I wanted it, but it was still a way better deal than forking over several times as much cash for the custom shop guitar. The custom shop guitar would have all sorts of little cosmetic details that would really impress people who see it, but when people listen to the final recording they can't tell the difference.
What does that mean? What is integrity but adhering to a set of moral principles or, as one might say, rules?
I think it's a severely flawed line of reasoning that concludes morality is some sort of innate feeling. There are some basic moral problems that seem obvious (such as murder is wrong) but much of the conflict in this world lacks such clarity. For example, a law that bans abortion may seem good to one who interprets life as something that begins at conception, but bad to one who does not. In a case where two people disagree on this issue, one of them is wrong. One of them will necessarily view the law as a bad law but that doesn't make it so.
To quote Vonnegut from a book about World War II: "Everybody else, no matter what side he was on, no matter what he did, is sure a good man could not have acted in any other way."
The sad truth is that those in government who are currently violating the rights of their citizens and partaking in various other forms of corruption believe that they're doing so for some sort of greater good. What is a 'good person?' Another relevant quote from Mother Night:
I would prefer to dedicate [this book] to one familiar person, male or female, widely known to have done evil while saying to himself, "A very good me, the real me, a me made in heaven, is hidden deep inside."
Almost everyone thinks they're a good person yet almost everyone has done bad things, be it consciously or unwittingly.
I was thinking of flight schools myself. Those definitely should be banned, as they directly helped the 9/11 attackers.
Or any schools, really. Chemistry is really nothing but terrorism 101.
only politicians who actually promise that they can address issues.
So only all politicians? Has there ever been a politician who was elected on a platform of not addressing issues?
In retrospect, Obama's Nobel prize does look pretty bad and the Nobel committee ought to eat crow over that one, but I fail to see how this is a 'microcosm of the unbridgeable gap between progressive and left-wing aspirations and reality.' This is what I asked you to elaborate on - how exactly does an undeserved Nobel prize refute the political philosophy Obama claims to support (though he hardly does so in practice)?
There are more concrete examples of the unbridgeable gap between conservative economic policies and reality than liberal economic policy. Japan in the 90s is another example. That's not to say you can't find examples of liberal economic policies failing -- Greece is a prime example of how things can go wrong with such a model. I'm of the belief that there's more than one way to skin a cat, that both central planning and laissez-faire work as economic models but both have their own advantages and disadvantages. I think this assertion is backed up by the fact that there are functional economies based on both models, with most being a balance utilizing elements of both.
Obama's primary failures as president, especially in the eyes of his liberal base, have nothing to do with liberal economic policy. It's his support of the police state that was initiated with the original Patriot Act, which is a violation of his oath of office (to uphold the Constitution). This is not a liberal/conservative issue, as can be demonstrated by equal support from both sides of the aisle. The opponents of this problem -- Ron Wyden and Rand Paul -- represent opposite poles of the economic policy debate.
So, no, Obama's conduct as president does little or nothing to discredit liberalism as a sound political/economic philosophy. He would have to practice what he preaches for that to be true. He's done plenty to discredit himself personally, but I fail to see how that extends to the ideology he purports to support when he has hardly executed it in practice.
This is kind of an extreme example but in this regard he's kind of like Stalin. Stalin's lip-service to communism had little to do with his actual support of communist ideas and everything to do with him using the communist party as a vehicle to power. He made the real communists, such as Trotsky, enemies of the state or stooges afraid to contradict him. In this regard, Obama is a Stalin and guys like Ron Wyden are our Trotskys. On the conservative side, Bush was your Stalin and guys like Ron Paul were your Trotskys. The issues at hand are more nuanced than liberal = bad/conservative = good.
Congratulations on trolling a long ass political rant out of me.
Please elaborate . . . this should be good.
One could make a similar claim about any politician. "Politician X's failure regarding issue Z demonstrates his ideology is detached from reality."
Of course, when we were most critical of the USSR we also had a crazy congressman persecuting American citizens in kangaroo courts for their rumored political affiliation.
Diesels aren't that uncommon. VW and Mercedes both sell a decent amount of them in the States. It's popular for big trucks that need a lot of torque to haul stuff. Semi-trucks almost all run on diesel.
Until recently, there have been drawbacks to using diesel to fuel normal sedans. They were loud, dirty, and slow. VW and Mercedes have both invested a lot of R&D into eliminating these problems and have been working on them for decades. Like Mazda with the rotary engine, they made the necessary investments in the past that allow them to put incredible diesels on the road today. I find it hard to believe another company could catch up to VW when it comes to diesels without investing more than such a venture would be worth. Even though Ford, GM, and Dodge have all produced diesels throughout the years, their focus was maximizing torque for big loud trucks. Their diesel engines epitomize everything VW has sought to eliminate: loud, dirty, with a focus on maximizing power rather than maximizing efficiency.
Also, let's not fool ourselves into believing biofuels are an ideal replacement for gasoline. As far as the environment goes, it's like switching from cigarettes to light cigarettes. An added drawback is that biofuels are renewable, which means that if there would be less incentive to replace it with something better in the future, even if the technology was there. Our solution to gasoline shouldn't be 'gasoline-light.'